Words used to describe music?

doggy

Can someone enlighten me please?

Watching reviews just baffles me, one guy tonight said the speakers sounded more holographic,wtf?
Obviously we also have warm, cold, weighty, dynamic, punchy etc etc.

Ugg10

I can only assume he meant 3D I.e. he could place the different instruments in 3D space easily, some being left/right, up/down, back/front and you could identify different instruments easily by their position. Possibly a combination of what is usually referred to as soundstage (large in this case), depth and separation.

Just a stab.

This is maybe an easier description to quantify I.e. close your eyes and point to an instrument in an ensemble, the wide4 the extremes maybe the more “holographic”.

larkone

Otherwise it can become cornery

Derek S-H

I wouldn't want to be a professional Hi-Fi reviewer.

For a start, their job seems to involve dissecting music into its constituent parts, rather than experiencing it as an organic whole.

Secondly, it's what I call "chin-stroking" - you sit there passively analysing what you're hearing rather than engaging with it emotionally or viscerally.

And thirdly, they seem to take it and themselves so seriously! So they'll only listen to "proper" music like Jazz or Classical, you know, stuff that's really po-faced and technical.

I am probably doing them a disservice as it might be more about how they say things rather than what they say, and I am completely biased as I have no interest in the technical dexterity of musicians nor the genres they always seem to use to demo kit.

I like @Ed Selley on here as he always seems to get some kind of pop culture reference into his reviews and he's happy to listen to noisy and less-than-perfectly recorded genres like Dance, Electronica and Shoegaze!

deantown

Just a thought - Sh*te means the Speakers are rubbish/crap.

oldcootstereo

The terms/adjectives used to describe/rate sound/music reproduction are a potential subjective quagmire.  In the Ontario VQA wine industry, there is a specific list of terms vintners are allowed to use to describe their products.  Not so in the audio industry... Does "crisp highs" or "tight bass" mean the same thing to all listeners of all genres?  Doubtful.  

I can radically change the character of the bass in my room by merely moving the subwoofer or turning the sub volume up or down.  In my own system, volume-compensated digital-sourced with the bass optimized to showcase Supertramp will literally shake the floor when playing You Should Se Me In A Crown or I'm Only Human with the exact same settings.  Are the speakers/sub at fault?  Probably not.  One aspect of the Circle of Confusion.  

Maybe one day some eager-beaver audiophile-statistician will analyze reviewers' use of specific terms to tease out whether it is the reviewers' rooms, systems, ears/brains driving the descriptions or the speakers/gear actually exhibiting the characteristics.  Toole did some of this for particular recording control rooms and the engineers who worked in them.  I know my perception of my own system varies noticeably with humidity (it swings from very humid summers to very dry winters here).  Few hifi enthusiasts have separate listening rooms tightly controlled for temperature/humidity, so no matter what the reviewer says, the ambient conditions in a listener's room will be different enough to change those subtle, nuanced responses reviewers focus on.  And that is just one potential set of room conditions, and not the most influential, in a VERY long list.  

A tour through even the most popular/prolific reviewer sites will show many different ratings/descriptors for the same speakers... one may assume modern speakers worth the effort of reviewing are manufactured to reasonably close tolerances (yes, higher price should give tighter tolerances) so what is the difference in the reviews?  Toole put a stake through the subjective ratings zombie by analyzing the Consumer Reports reviews vs. his own testing.  

As Derek S-H states, adding in the subjective rating of the speakers/system's ability to handle the various genre/artist style/content of the music to this mess and it gets silly fast.  We listen to nearly all music except rap and opera. I also draw the line at country music where if you play it backwards, your girlfriend comes home, your lost dog is found and your stolen pickup truck is returned undamaged.   I guess my system genre-handling would mirror my own skill-set, jack-of-all-trades master of none. It works for me, at a price I could afford.

Toole gives this advice: Look for L-R speakers that give the flattest/widest-dispersion anechoic plots in your price range.  Bass response is mostly shaped by the room/positioning, assuming again that the anechoic sub/woofer response is as flat as possible in your price range.  Careful positioning and appropriate EQ correction can help get the best performance out of any set of speakers.